If you’ve ever been in charge of your company’s cloud cost, you likely understand how painful it can be to accurately allocate shared cloud spend. In fact, in the 2021 State of FinOps report, “dealing with shared costs” was the second most common challenge faced by FinOps. Today, I’m excited to share that we’ve taken a huge step toward alleviating that pain.

AWS resource tagging is fundamental for effective cloud cost management. By creating and allocating cost-related tags in AWS, you can organize and manage your resources according to keys and values that make sense to you. This helps you better understand your cloud costs and manage your spending. But proper tagging isn't easy. While AWS provides several useful resources, you may still run into some issues that require more involved solutions.

As cloud use has increased, so have the costs associated with it. In 2020, surveyed organizations reported being over budget for their cloud spend by an average of 23%. Most are spending more than they expected, and to top it off — they don’t feel they’re getting value from that spend.

It's something you know. Those who rely on or offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are under constant pressure to innovate. Often, this means quickly building new features and releasing them more frequently. Staying on budget and on time is also critical for staying competitive. Likewise, SaaS providers should also offer customers cost-effective solutions to their technology challenges. But that’s not all. You must also always release quality code that provides seamless user experiences.

Profitability in SaaS can be tricky. A company's net earnings are based on its invested capital, assets, and equity. But its profit margin shows how much money it extracts from its total sales or revenue — its ability to turn revenue into profit. Performing a thorough margin analysis or profit margin analysis is a reliable way to assess the company’s financial health.

Ask anyone who’s managing any cloud environment of any size, and they will undoubtedly bring up the stress they experience on a regular basis over tags. Since the dawn of cloud, every cloud user has struggled with the challenge of tagging — essentially the only mechanism that exists for you to apply metadata to your cloud environment. The fact that tags themselves are an imperfect tool — both inflexible and hard to manage — makes no difference.

Many companies don’t know where to begin when migrating to AWS. Some worry their data will leak, while others don't know the most efficient migration strategy for AWS. Another group worries about overspending when moving to AWS. The migration strategy involved plays a crucial part in all of these concerns. This guide will discuss more than just AWS cloud migration strategies.

The best budgets aren't roadblocks. They're guardrails: boundaries for quick, collaborative work. Historically, when finance and engineering teams have discussed cloud cost, they’ve run into an obstacle: They don’t speak the same language. At the end of each month, finance gets an ever-changing cloud bill, and engineering explains that, whatever the total, it represents what they need to do their work. Stalemate.

Moving large amounts of data to the cloud can be arduous and time-consuming. A cloud migration would take years if engineers manually moved data from assessment through mobilization and migration phases. An effective cloud migration also requires adequate data encryption, fast data transfer speeds, and constant monitoring. Migrating workloads to AWS requires you to monitor costs in real-time as well to avoid overspending.

For most SaaS companies, COGS (which stands for cost of goods sold) is used to calculate gross margin and profit. COGS is an accepted term with a specific definition under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) — and is widely used as part of calculations to gauge the health and valuation of a company. Like many accounting practices, COGS stems from the industrial era, when most businesses were concerned with the creation of physical goods.